Sue Ann Nivens

Sue Ann Nivens hosts WJM's cooking-and-crafts program "The Happy Homemaker," all ruffled aprons and syrupy cheer for the cameras. Off-camera she is something else entirely: brassy, predatory, and openly on the hunt for a man, dispensing compliments to Mary with a smile that never quite reaches her eyes.

The joke is the gap between broadcast Sue Ann and real Sue Ann, and Betty White plays both without a seam, sliding from dessert-topping enthusiasm to blunt innuendo in the same breath. It's a performance built on comic timing so precise it turns a stock TV-hostess parody into one of sitcom's great monsters of cheerful selfishness.